Build your own disk drive emulator for the Atari 8-bit computers

Paweł Mandes‎ has posted today on Atari 8-bit Computers Facebook group a link to a very detailed article explaining how you can very easily build a disk drive/tape recorder emulator for Atari 8-bit computers using an Arduino and few more parts.

His tutorial covers the SDrive-MAX project, an open source disk drive/tape recorder emulator for Atari 8-bit computers, based on sdrive-ng ported to Arduino platform.

Mandes goes in detail on how to program the microcontroller, how to build an extension for better compatibility with the SIO bus, and finishing with how to prepare the SD card and software to run the device.

Although there will be a need for soldering at some point, the steps look easy enough for the average weekend retro computer enthusiasts. To make his work even more complete and community-oriented, Pawel offered his help through the Facebook group.

The link to the article and the Facebook group links are provided below, but if you call yourself an Atari enthusiast and it is not on that group already, what’s wrong with you? 🙂